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I don’t think the position taken by those four people, whose rationale for the suit was an interest in public health and personal rights, is particularly out of the Mexican mainstream. As Pablo Giralt, one of the four, said:

… I have no desire to use cannabis. The point was to reaffirm the liberal state and to approach drugs from a health and not a criminal perspective.

All of which makes it less than likely that the “National Debate on the Use of Marijuana” is going to be much more than an academic and political exercise of more interest to foreigners than to Mexicans themselves.

Jan-Albert Hootsen lays out the main arguments of those opposing further legalization in “Vice News“…. all based on the presumption that marijuana legalization will do nothing to lessen the problems of organized crime. What is troubling is that the court’s ruling had nothing to do with the effects on organized crime. While the effect of legalization on organized crime is an issue — the claims that legalization is meant to weaken the reach of criminals were ones more likely to be raised in consumer nations (above all in the United States) than in producer nations.

As I’ve pointed out before, marijuana usage in Mexico is extremely low. Despite the anecdotal “evidence” (usually by foreigners living in “expat” enclaves) to the contrary, the best estimate of cannabis consumption in Mexico is about 1.2 percent of the population (compared to 14.8 percent in the United States). While I suppose it is possible that personal consumption rates would rise with legality, it certainly would have little or no effect on the marijuana trade: there just aren’t enough consumers — and, given the court’s ruling, the consumers would be growers themselves — to mean anything at all. What is done in Netherlands (consumption rate estimate 7.0 percent) or Uruguay (8.3 percent, and — like the United States, next door to a major producer, Paraguay) is completely irrelevant to Mexico.

Even if one assumes that this “opens to door” to full legalization, I see more problems than solutions. Perhaps the so-called cartels would get out of the marijuana business (and into the human trafficking, opium and heroin production, meth lab, and extortion trade instead), but so what? Despite the best arguments from marijuana enthusiasts in the United States and Canada, that their “good weed” will drive “Mexican ditchweed” off the market, basic economics tells me that cheap (even inferior) products drive higher priced (although superior) sell better.

We’ve seen a few “mega-plantations” of marijuana — in water scarce areas like Durango and Baja California — even while the cultivation is illegal. One fears for our water tables if marijuana was to be a commercial product. And, while what returns to the rural community from the illegal trade is only a pittance, the gangsters have to win the “hearts and minds” of their suppliers if they are to do business at all. While the “cartels” might be terrible people, they are locals, and some sense of noblesse oblige — or at least a paternal attitude towards employees and their community. After all, they live there. What will be the effect on rural economies and on rural workers should the industry be controlled by foreign corporations?

I’m sure legalization will generate a lot of excitement in some quarters, but don’t expect it to give birth to … anything. Or, as Edgardo Buscaglia puts it, absent a decent regulatory system for business and industry, any talk about legalization is just “legal masturbation.”

Legalization is a crock, at least in the US. It allows the for-profit mentality to take the marketing and apply it in ways I was most afraid of, their targeting the most vulnerable and that’s nothing new.

Now de-criminalizing on the other hand is an acceptable measure, we here in Washington State and Oregon really screwed up by not just doing that. There are so many grubby greedy fingers now and the State has the dirtiest hand of all, absolutely sickening. The continued rationale that the govt will somehow make this better by legalizing it is just as bad the enormously biased prosecution we faced (and still do) previously. The govt hasn’t changed one iota so expecting these clowns to get it right is beyond laughable.

As for Mexico, maybe they can get it together and show us a better model, we desperately need it up here.

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The background of Mexican anti-clericalism and the "atheist" general who led the Catholic counter-revolution of the 1920s
128 pp., Editorial Mazatlán, 2012.

An oral history of the World War II experiences of Gilberto Bosques (1894 – 1997), Mexico 's Consul General in Marseilles, France, who saved tens of thousands from the Nazis.
36 pp. Editorial Mazatlán, 2007 $35 MXP (click the image)

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